I'm definitely in the "for almost everything" camp. It's less ambiguous especially when you consider the DD/MM vs MM/DD nonsense between US dates vs elsewhere. Pretty much the only time I don't use ISO-8601 is when I'm using non-numeric month names like when saying a date out loud.
In Canada we use MM/DD and DD/MM so you never quite know which it is! There's an expense spreadsheet I fill out for work that uses one format in one place and the other format in another....
I recall writing a script that produces that 01237 with smaller digits around it for the current date. It lists the numbers that occur in the date (0, 2, 3 and 9 for 2023-09-09), the smaller digits show at which position they show up in a YYYYMMDD format (the 0 shows up on positions 2, 5 and 7)
The script has not been pushed online cause it was so dang bad
My company has decided to standardized on phone numbers with dots instead of dashes. They’re in email signatures, memos, client proposals. I absolutely hate it and it rubs me the wrong way every time I see it. It’s wrong.
Although I actually like that format a lot, we use characters to help elicit context. 2023/08/09 is fine since we have been using / for dates for so long. Also it blows my mind why people don’t use : in 24 hour times. 16:40 is great, no am pm bullshit and you immediately know I’m talking time.
Not "many people." Americans. Americans find it hard to read. I'm not 100% sure but I'm fairly certain everyone else in the world agrees that either day/month/year or year/month/day is the best way to clearly indicate a date. You know, because big to small. America believes month/day/year for some stupid fucking reason.
I will never stop being impressed by the absolute insanity that is British rhyming slang.
Apparently I've never heard seppo before, short for septic tank, rhyming with Yank. I just learned a new mildy derogatory term for Americans, nice
I'm not an American and English isn't my first language, so the US way to write dates always confused me. Now, I finally understand it! Many thanks, this is legitimately sooooo useful!
I am an American and I use it religiously for the record. Especially for version numbers. Major.minor.year.month.day.hour.minute-commit. It sorts easy, is specific, intuitive, and makes it clear which version you’re using/working on.
America believes month/day/year for some stupid fucking reason.
It's because of Great Britain. We adopted it from them while a bunch of colonies and it regionally spread to others.
America didn't change, probably because we have been so geographically isolated (relatively speaking), whereas the modern day UK did change to be more like Europe.
People get so goddamn hot and bothered by things that ultimately don't matter almost like it is a culture war issue. Americans maintain the mm/dd/yyyy format because that's how speak the dates.
I wouldn't say it is us Americans who "find it hard to read" if someone from elsewhere in the world sees an American date, knows we date things in the old way they used to date things, and then loses their minds over having to swap day for month. Everyone just wants to be contrarian and circle jerk about ISO and such.
Us devs, on the other hand, absolutely should use the same format of yyyy-mm-dd plus time and time zone offset, as needed. There's no reason, in this age, for dates to be culturally distinct in the tech space. Follow a machine-first standard and then convert just like we do with all other localizatons.
But hey, if people want to be pedantic, let's talk about archaic gendered languages which are completely useless and has almost zero consistency.
Bruh even Britain uses day-month-year, even speaks them as “9th of September”.
“September 9th” doesn't even make sense in English as there is only 1 September in a year.
Or anyone who has to work with Americans. Especially when you also work with other countries as well. You can't assume dd/mm/yyyy or mm/dd/yyyy blindly in either case. yyyy-mm-dd solves the issue entirely because both sides at least agree that yyyy-dd-mm isn't a thing.
I think it's fair that programmatic and human readable can be different. If someone is putting in the month word for a logging system they can fuck right off though
As long as they use letter for months, like Jul 09, 2013 its fine. Otherwise prefer a sorted timescale version. Either slow changing to fast changing yyyy mm dd or fast to slow dd mm yyyy.
The letters make no sense to me. Like Jul, Jun, I'm constantly mixing them up. Give me a good solid number like 07 or 10. No mixing that up. Higher numbers come after lower numbers, simple as.
Together with hh:mm(:ss) for times and +hh:mm for timezones. Don't make me deal with that 12am/pm bullshit that doesn't make any sense, and don't make make me look up just what the time difference is between CEST and IST. Just give me the offsets +02:00 and +05:30, and I can calculate that my local time of 06:55+03:30=10:25 in India.
Upvoted because I appreciate the exposure for this dating method, but I personally use it for everything. Much clearer for a lot of reasons IMO. Biggest to smallest pretty much always makes the most sense.
I do too, even in notes at work or handwritten stuff at home. I don’t always need to be reminded of the year first, but sometimes it becomes important on older stuff.
Plus when you’re in the US and work with people from Europe, the unambiguous ordering of month and day is a nice safeguard against silly misunderstandings.
Three ways that people actually use. YYYY-MM-DD, DD-MM-YYYY, and MM-DD-YYYY (ew).
AFAIK no-one does YYYY-DD-MM, DD-YYYY-MM, or MM-YYYY-DD... yet. Don't let the Americans know about these formats, they might just start using them out of spite.
What, 2023-223 for the 223rd day of the year 2023? That... is oddly appealing for telling the actual progress of the year or grouping. No silly "does this group have 31, 30, 29 or 28 members", particularly the "is this year a multiple of four, but not of 100, unless it's also a multiple of 400?" bit with leap days.
You'll have oddities still, no matter which way you slice it, because our orbit is mathematically imperfect, but it's a start.
I lost about an hour of my life trying to create a historical timeline in MS Excel. Eventually learned this is impossible with dates earlier than 1900.
It's how the dates are typically said, here.
November 6th, 2020 = 11/6/2020. [Edit: I had written 9 instead of 11 for November.]
(We basically never say the sixth of November. It sounds positively ancient.)
It's easy to use, but I agree that YYYY-MM-DD is vastly superior for organization.
We basically never say the sixth of November. It sounds positively ancient.
When is your independence day, again?
Anyway, in Australia (and, I suspect, other places that use DD/MM/YYYY) we use "{ordinal} of {month}" (11th of August), "{ordinal} {month}" (11th August), and "{month} {ordinal}" (August 11th) pretty much interchangeably. In writing but not in speaking, we also sometimes use "{number} {month}" (11 August). That doesn't have any bearing on how we write it short form though, because those are different things. It's not the defence many Americans seem to think it is of their insane method of writing the short form.
It's kinda tongue in cheek, but that's how we say things in my part of the US. "Fourth of July" is spoken of exactly as if it were the name of the day, like "Thanksgiving" or "Christmas". Just like we still refer to "Cinco de Mayo" even though we don't speak Spanish.
Obviously it's not really called "Fourth of July", but nobody ever says "Nth of Month" here otherwise. And I'm kinda grateful as I like "bigger to smaller" notation. Yeah, mm/dd/yyyy sucks, but saying it that way is pretty expressive because the year rarely matters. So it's like "Hours and minutes" or (yeah, sorry Europeans) Feet and inches. Bigger before smaller quickly expresses precise information to our caveman brains. At least to my caveman brain.
Also, the movie really wasn't that good in retrospect, but we had some sort of fever about it because it was expensive with lots of explosions, and good music licensing. And both patriots and antipatriots had something to get out of it because aliens blew up the White House.
It's not the defence many Americans seem to think it is of their insane method of writing the short form.
I've never once been confused about a written date whilst in the US. Your country's other-side-of-the-Earth flip-floppery on how it uses dates really doesn't (and shouldn't) impact our system, which we continue to use because it has proven effective and easy. Trying to stagnate an evolving culture/language is pointless and about as futile as trying to force a river to run backwards. If people start jumbling up how we do it here, like you say Australia does, then that will be right, too.
It is a bit of a chicken and egg question though. Because do Americans not say it that way because of the date format or is that the date format because you don't say it that way?
Because in countries using DD.MM.YY we absolutely do say 6th of November.
That's probably what happened. Though I do like starting with the larger context when talking about dates, but omitting it when talking about the current month or year.
Except that mm/dd/yyyy and dd/mm/yyyy can be ambiguous, I definitely prefer the former if I'm not using an ISO date. But normally I just write ISO and my head translates to MMM dd,yyyy
It handles ambiguity too. Want to say something lasts for a period of 1 month without needing to bother checking how many days are in the current and next month? P1M. Done. Want to be more explicit and say 30 days? P30D. Want to say it in hours? Add the T separator: PT720H.
I used this kind of notation all the time when exporting logged historical data from SCADA systems into a file whose name I wanted to quickly communicate the start of a log and how long it ran:
20230701T0000-07--P30D..v101_pressure.csv
(“--” is the ISO-8601 (2004) recommended substitute for “/” in file names)
If anyone is interested, I made this Bash script to give me uptime but expressed as an ISO 8601 time period.
I actually need to standardize my code. I've got "learning F2" as something I want to do soon. The goal: use the exif data of my pictures to create [date in ISO 8601] - [original filename].[original file type termination]
So a picture taken the third of march 2022 titled "asdf.jpg" would become "2022-3-3 - asdf.jpg"
If you're on Linux exiftool can get the creation date for you: exiftool -p '$CreateDate' -d '%Y-%m-%d' FILENAME, and you could run tgat in a loop over your files, something like:
mkdir -p out
for f in *.jpg
do
createdate=$(exiftool -p '$CreateDate' -d '%Y-%m-%d' "${f}")
cp -p "${f}" "out/${createdate} - ${f}"
done
Obviously don't justbgo running code some stranger just posted on the internet, especially as I haven't tested it, but that should copy images from the current directory to a subdirectory called 'out' with the correct filenames.
I don't see any HTML when I look at that comment from Lemmy, but kbin seems to make a real mess of rendering code blocks.
Basically that bit had a few lines of code they could yse to do what they wanted.
I'm using NixOS. Ext4 filesystem. As to language, I'm not entirely sure what you mean. If you refer to the character set in the filenames, I think there are no characters that deviate from the English alphabet, numbers, dashes, and underscores.
Oh ok so you’re more so working with folder structure etc, so bash for when you plug-in a card?
I’m thinking in more programmatic terms, there’s definitely some bash scripting you can execute. Or just go balls out and write a service that executes on systemctl
I enforce ISO 8601 for the shared storage in my office. Before I got there, files were kinda stored in all kinds of formats, but mostly month first.
I tell the person under me she can store her files in her user any way she wants, but if it goes into shared storage, it's ISO 8601. I even have a folder in there called !Date format: YYYY-MM-DD Description to help anyone else remember.
Considering how there's almost no computers anymore with such limited resources that they can't store a string or convert to one, it's kind of crazy anybody bothers with the ambiguity of using numbers for the month.
The limited resource is not Compute Power, but Engineer time. Sure, you could ask someone to implement wrappers everywhere in the system so that the display is human-readable - or you could put one label somewhere clarifying the date format to readers.
Implement wrappers everywhere? Why can't they just write a single function that takes an ISO date a spits out a string (human readable) date? I'd put money down that such a function already exists in almost every library that deals with dates.
That's why I said "implement" and not just "write". The process of wiring in that existing function has non-negligible cost, as does keeping it updated/patched.
Sure, it should be pretty small - but it's non-zero. Is it worth it? That's a product decision.
It's written like 07 Aug 2013. It's consistent in character length, doesn't confuse internationals, doesn't take much space and is written exactly like being said around here. It's just not that great for file names.
Yeah, ok. Expanding the month to 3 chars does reduce potential confusion
I feel the need to be pedantic and point out that this is only necessary, however because of the ridiculous degenerate convention of MM DD YY(YY?) used by said country...
I imagine your complaint was referring to a community name in the abstract "/c/iso8601" rather than the proper Lemmy centralized name !lemmy.ml!@/c/iso8601 or whatever the horrible format that it is
My complaint was about the "subreddits as hashtags" thing that people did on Reddit where they'd link a non-existent sub (or one that only contained screenshots of people linking to it) instead of thinking of something original.
Separately, what's wrong with the ![email protected] format? It's pretty simple to remember and is very much part of the federated way that Lemmy is designed to be used!
Linking communitirs !iso8601!@someinstance is one of the core reasons why Lemmy failed to capture even 1% of 1% of 1% of Reddit's userbase at probably the greatest time of turmoil of discontent with that site for the next 5 years.
This formulation insist on centralizing communities in single instances and creates both fragmentation of the community while also making them concentrated on whatever the biggest one is.
The few users that make it past the registration catastrophe, when they realize this is how communities work, they just leave, because it means Lemmy isn't federated where it counts. Communities end up owned by a single instance owner and mod team. It's Reddit except somehow worse.
I have a watch that uses MM/DD for date, which pissed me off to no end. While looking for a way to change it to DD/MM, I found out that they actually used ISO-8601 and dropped the year. Now I don't know how to feel about it.
ISO 8601 has spec for how to drop the year. You write it like --MM-DD (two dashes to indicate omission). Of course nobody really uses it beside the absolute nerds (e.g. me).
ISO dates are the goat because they string compare correctly. Just yesterday I shaved 2 full seconds off a page transition by removing a date parse in the middle of a hot sorting loop. Everything should use ISO in my opinion.
To the commenters justifying the written form MM-DD-YYYY on the basis of preferring to say the name of the month followed by the day (which the written numerical sequence does not preclude you from doing). If someone were to say something like "the time is a quarter to eleven" do you think they would have a case for writing it 45:10? And if so, how would you deal with the ambiguity of "ten past ten" if they wrote it 10:10 instead of 10:10?
Windows auto sorts it so any folder or any code reading it reads it in order without needing anything special. It shortens the filename, it's fast to type on the number pad
what the fuck did you just fucking say about me you little bitch ill have you know i graduated top of my class in the navy seals and ive been involved in numerous secret raids on alquaeda and i have over 300 confirmed kills i am trained in gorilla warfare and im the top sniper in the entire us armed forces you are nothing to me but just another target i will wipe you the fuck out with precision the likes of which has never been seen before on this earth mark my fucking words you think you can get away with saying that shit to me over the internet think again fucker as we speak i am contacting my secret network of spies across the usa and your ip is being traced right now so you better prepare for the storm maggot the storm that wipes out the pathetic little thing you call your life youre fucking dead kid i can be anywhere anytime and i can kill you in over seven hundred ways and thats just with my bare hands not only am i extensively trained in unarmed combat but i have access to the entire arsenal of the united states marine corps and i will use it to its full extent to wipe your miserable ass off the face of the continent you little shit if only you could have known what unholy retribution your little clever comment was about to bring down upon you maybe you would have held your fucking tongue but you couldnt you didnt and now youre paying the price you goddamn idiot i will shit fury all over you and you will drown in it youre fucking dead kiddo
I'm a systems guy. ISO8601 or die. Whomever decided to put the most significant digits at the end of MMDDYYYY can get fired. From a cannon. Into the sun.
Lot of talk of numerics only. The problem there is knowing what format the information is in since clearly there are 3 possibilities. Without context and during certain parts of the month you're hosed. Best to remove ambiguity and go with the alpha numeric format.
Any date format can be unambiguous as long as it's the one that everyone agrees on, and all date formats will be ambiguous as long as we have several in use.
I kinda gave up, nowadays when i write a date to someone i specify the date format. Like i will send "01/05/2024 (DD/MM/YYYY)" because it's the only way to be sure
The second reason why yyyy-MM-dd is the correct way to write days (beside being sortable by default) is because even Americans doesn't have any similar format that it can be confused with.
I learned this in my first half year as a programmer I think, somewhere well over a decade back and so far it seems that guy was right.
As monsterous as it is yyyy-mm-dd could also be misconstrued by said unfortunate Americans as yyyy-dd-mm because...well...yeah. As noted elsewhere this dd mmm yyyy format also works nicely in written and verbal communication as 12th of august where no one ever is going to write or speak to each other twenty twenty three august twelfth. So again, more universal and less ambiguous.
As monstrous as it is yyyy-mm-dd could also be misconstrued by said unfortunate Americans as yyyy-dd-mm because...well...yeah. As noted elsewhere this dd mmm yyyy format also works nicely in written and verbal communication as 12th of august where no one ever is going to write or speak to each other twenty twenty three august twelfth. So again, more universal and less ambiguous.
Problem is that languages get in the way. Some are pretty similar like 15 ago (Spanish) being 15 Aug (English), but 1 ene (Spanish) aren't that similar to 1 Jan (English).
And for the usual "But English is used everwhere! I live in X!" crowd: NO, it isn't. Not everything you see as an "expat" is the same as the actual locals with their own language.
Seeing as I do a lot of AV editing I use this format to keep track of Audio files I do production on. YYYYMMDD Filename Version. It's often a case of working on a file and coming back to it weeks or months later, and in most cases there are multiple versions and revisions as I collaborate with my production partner.
It helps me keep track of the timeframe, what it is and which version so I can ensure rendered versions I'm using in other directories or as assets in other files are consistent and up to date.
The directories got quite messy and confusing initially until I adopted the ISO date format for this case.
join south africa and (sorta) japan, use YYYY-MM-DD as a default - sorts well, zero ambiguity.. at least until some joker starts popularising YYYY-DD-MM, anyway
Everyone talks big game about the file names but forget how important standardizing on log time stamps is too. When I’m able to pipe a bunch of logs into sort, I get so happy.
I always have written my dates this way. It's one of those things that always seemed weird to me and then when I realize that only in America do we write our dates MM-DD-YYYY /facepalm
For speaking or writing it out going month then day feels natural, although I know it’s a regional thing. If you’re going number format, it should always go smallest to largest (DD-MM-YYYY) or largest to smallest (YYYY-MM-DD). For file names, definitely the latter so you can sort by alphabetical and everything is in order.
What if you create a file that has information related to a date that the file wasn't created on?
For example, you write a report about an event that happened two weeks ago. Now the created and modified metadata is tied to today's date, not the date two weeks ago.
I usually give file names a human readable name like "report on the event 27.7.1994". Makes it easier for other people to understand if I need to pass the file on.
For images I keep the original file name when I store it in a database (Capture one/Lightroom/etc) in folders by the year and then month they are taken: 2023 --> 08 and so on. If I eksport images for a specific project, I will keep the original file name but add project name and give it a number based on sequence. Everything else is in the metadata
But if they day is less than 12 you have no way of verifying it's not supposed to actually be DD-MM-YYYY, plus sorting by date is all fucked if you don't put year first...
Yes, MM DD YY only makes sense when you're speaking.
In written language it should always follow the order of smallest to largest, meaning day, month, and then year. Imo.
Though I personally try to use YYYY-MM-DD as much as possible in day to day life, if not applicable I use DD MM YYYY. YYYY-MM-DD of course doesn't follow the order of smallest to largest, instead following the opposite order, though at least it has an order.
When does saying the month first ever help when you're speaking? The month doesn't change for like 30 days. The only thing that matters is dd which changes daily. If someone asks me what the date I'll give them the day date and nothing else.
I don't need to say it's the 9th and watch them panic that maybe it's January.
So if you made an appointment for the 2nd of September you'd tell 'em "yeah let's meet on the 2nd" or "yeah let's meet on the 245th" you're gonna need the month somewhere.
Of course if it's the same month it wouldn't make a difference if you said "let's meet on the 10th" or "let's meet on the 10th of August" but if you're making appointments for different months which in everyday life or in a work environment is not unusual you can't just say "yeah the 2nd" and expect them to know which month. "Yeah you can expect delivery by the 4th".
Tl;Dr:
I didn't even say "it's the only way to say it when speaking" I said "only makes sense when you're speaking." because in written form MM DD YY is just shit for everyone except Americans, to the point where context sometimes is the only saving grace. Vice versa applies.
Yep you're 100% right. My job start date was miscommunicated because of this, they were like "you start on the 17th"... turns out it was the next month. Better than getting it wrong in the other direction though for sure!
Largest to smallest is way more logical than smallest to largest. You start general and get more specific as you progress. It is in general a better approach to conveying information and cataloging data. Not just dates.
Yeah but if you're communicating a date, then it's likely that the larger chunks of time will match and can be ommitted, so it's natural to go up the chain in until you hit the day/month/year that matches the current one. Although I guess that'd imply using minutes before hours... I guess you could go large to small and skip anything that matches too. Nvm lol
Yes, MM DD YY only makes sense when you're speaking
For many people it doesn't. It's something that's exclusive to the US. In British English it's day before month when speaking.
It's something that is taught in school as "remember that the Americans say date before month so you don't get confused". But in a business context it's bloody annoying you don't switch to the international standard.
Like I replied to someone else in this thread: I wasn't saying "it's the only way that makes sense when speaking" I said "it only makes sense when speaking". That doesn't make any other way of saying dates make less sense when speaking though.
I'm definitely in the "for almost everything" camp. It's less ambiguous especially when you consider the DD/MM vs MM/DD nonsense between US dates vs elsewhere. Pretty much the only time I don't use ISO-8601 is when I'm using non-numeric month names like when saying a date out loud.
Yeah, it's pretty much everything for me too. The biggest exception being when UI is involved and a longhand date format would be more friendly.
Friendly to who?
The time reapers
In Canada we use MM/DD and DD/MM so you never quite know which it is! There's an expense spreadsheet I fill out for work that uses one format in one place and the other format in another....
Holy cats, that sounds like a nightmare.
Hey, that sounds like my cloud storage providers auto billing system.
“Your auto renewal will draft on 08/09/23.”
Is that August 9th or September 8th? Literally depends on where the person you ask is in the world.
That would ruin my entire day
And you can do a simple sort on the combined number and youve sorted by date.
Can't believe he missed the opportunity to add 41332 to the number of ways of how not to write dates.
I must be missing something.
Experience with excel.
I feel better that I don't understand now.
Excel doesn't display ISO dates unless you define a custom format.
Excel ::shudder::
They're trying to make it look fake!
Drivingcrooner.com
Everyone tries to make it look fake. Fuckers!
I recall writing a script that produces that 01237 with smaller digits around it for the current date. It lists the numbers that occur in the date (0, 2, 3 and 9 for 2023-09-09), the smaller digits show at which position they show up in a YYYYMMDD format (the 0 shows up on positions 2, 5 and 7)
The script has not been pushed online cause it was so dang bad
ISO-8601 over all other formats. 2023-08-09T21:11:00Z
Simple, sortable, intuitive.
Awful to actually read, though. Using T as a delimiter is mental... At least the hyphen provides some white space
Why are you splitting and delimiting a date object? Convert it to a shallower object if that's what you need
While you are definitely right, I and many others use yyyy-mm-dd outside of software. And that's when the T becomes super lame.
Honestly, even a lowercase t.
You get used to it.
Too long. Even 2023-08-09 is too long for me. But since I like the readability I use 2023.08.09. Less pixels and more readable then 20230809.
My company has decided to standardized on phone numbers with dots instead of dashes. They’re in email signatures, memos, client proposals. I absolutely hate it and it rubs me the wrong way every time I see it. It’s wrong.
In Germany this is standardized, too. DIN 5008 for phone numbers. Areacode Number-extension. For example 0123 456789-01
Same number of pixels, they are just different colours. But you still paid for them.
Although I actually like that format a lot, we use characters to help elicit context. 2023/08/09 is fine since we have been using / for dates for so long. Also it blows my mind why people don’t use : in 24 hour times. 16:40 is great, no am pm bullshit and you immediately know I’m talking time.
ISO 8601 is always the correct way to format dates.
ISO 8601 is the only correct way to format timestamps.
The intersection of iso8601 and rfc3339.
https://ijmacd.github.io/rfc3339-iso8601/
Christ, do this many people really find iso8601 hard to read? It’s the date and the time with a T in the middle.
Not "many people." Americans. Americans find it hard to read. I'm not 100% sure but I'm fairly certain everyone else in the world agrees that either day/month/year or year/month/day is the best way to clearly indicate a date. You know, because big to small. America believes month/day/year for some stupid fucking reason.
I'm pretty sure it's because of the way we say it. Like, "May 6th, 2023". So we write it 5/6/2023.
That said, I think it's fucking stupid.
Yer, just like the most important day for the seppos... The 4th of July...
I will never stop being impressed by the absolute insanity that is British rhyming slang. Apparently I've never heard seppo before, short for septic tank, rhyming with Yank. I just learned a new mildy derogatory term for Americans, nice
In British English you say the date before the month as well. I know that even saying the month first sounds very jarring too me.
I'm not an American and English isn't my first language, so the US way to write dates always confused me. Now, I finally understand it! Many thanks, this is legitimately sooooo useful!
I am an American and I use it religiously for the record. Especially for version numbers. Major.minor.year.month.day.hour.minute-commit. It sorts easy, is specific, intuitive, and makes it clear which version you’re using/working on.
It's because of Great Britain. We adopted it from them while a bunch of colonies and it regionally spread to others.
America didn't change, probably because we have been so geographically isolated (relatively speaking), whereas the modern day UK did change to be more like Europe.
People get so goddamn hot and bothered by things that ultimately don't matter almost like it is a culture war issue. Americans maintain the mm/dd/yyyy format because that's how speak the dates.
I wouldn't say it is us Americans who "find it hard to read" if someone from elsewhere in the world sees an American date, knows we date things in the old way they used to date things, and then loses their minds over having to swap day for month. Everyone just wants to be contrarian and circle jerk about ISO and such.
Us devs, on the other hand, absolutely should use the same format of yyyy-mm-dd plus time and time zone offset, as needed. There's no reason, in this age, for dates to be culturally distinct in the tech space. Follow a machine-first standard and then convert just like we do with all other localizatons.
But hey, if people want to be pedantic, let's talk about archaic gendered languages which are completely useless and has almost zero consistency.
Bruh even Britain uses day-month-year, even speaks them as “9th of September”.
“September 9th” doesn't even make sense in English as there is only 1 September in a year.
America did this.
There is no excusing that.
Day/month/year is not in the same category as y/m/d. That crap is so ambiguous. Is today August 9th? Or September 8th? Y/m/d to the rescue.
It's only ambiguous to Americans.
Or anyone who has to work with Americans. Especially when you also work with other countries as well. You can't assume dd/mm/yyyy or mm/dd/yyyy blindly in either case. yyyy-mm-dd solves the issue entirely because both sides at least agree that yyyy-dd-mm isn't a thing.
You're almost there, just use - instead of / and everyone knows what you mean
Because who cares what day it is without knowing the month first.
Who cares what month it is without knowing the year first
Who cares what year it is without knowing which dimension first
Who cares what dimension it is without knowing which timeline first
Of course, don't you forget the current month all the time? I know I do!
I actually do, and I know I'm not alone.
How often do you mentally need to update the month in your head though? I can literally tell you.
Ah yes, because all dates you see every day have to do with the current month
10 feels like an October...
I think it's fair that programmatic and human readable can be different. If someone is putting in the month word for a logging system they can fuck right off though
That way you can sort the months of the year, in order:
I use it all the time when writing dates.
2023-08-09: just read from the end. 9th August 2023.
As long as they use letter for months, like Jul 09, 2013 its fine. Otherwise prefer a sorted timescale version. Either slow changing to fast changing yyyy mm dd or fast to slow dd mm yyyy.
The letters make no sense to me. Like Jul, Jun, I'm constantly mixing them up. Give me a good solid number like 07 or 10. No mixing that up. Higher numbers come after lower numbers, simple as.
Nah, letters bring another complexity - besides with them Feb gets sorted after Dec.
what
It warms my heart to see so many comments in the camp of "I use it everywhere". Absolutely same here. You are my people.
Together with hh:mm(:ss) for times and +hh:mm for timezones. Don't make me deal with that 12am/pm bullshit that doesn't make any sense, and don't make make me look up just what the time difference is between CEST and IST. Just give me the offsets +02:00 and +05:30, and I can calculate that my local time of 06:55+03:30=10:25 in India.
You never know when something might need to become a filename, so you might as well just use ISO 8601 for everything.
ISO 8601 gang. You’d never want to describe dates that way but for file management the convenience is massive.
If you're using a *NIX command line, something like
mkdir $(date +%F)_photosis super handy.
I do. Anything I have to put a datecode on, always gets a stamp of YYYYMMDD.
That's not ISO8601
That is the basic format of ISO8601, hyphens are only used in the extended format which is encouraged to be used in plain text.
See ISO 8601:2004 section 2.3.3 basic format
Upvoted because I appreciate the exposure for this dating method, but I personally use it for everything. Much clearer for a lot of reasons IMO. Biggest to smallest pretty much always makes the most sense.
I do too, even in notes at work or handwritten stuff at home. I don’t always need to be reminded of the year first, but sometimes it becomes important on older stuff.
Plus when you’re in the US and work with people from Europe, the unambiguous ordering of month and day is a nice safeguard against silly misunderstandings.
...and if I don't need the year, my eyes simply skip to the dash and continue to read from there.
Nah man. Use 8601 for everything. They’re intrinsically chronologically sortable.
In a programmatic context? Sure.
In an “I want to be able to comprehend this by glancing at it” context: absolutely not.
2023-08-10 15:45:33-04:00is WAY more human legible than1691696733.What, you don't remember your time in Unix timestamps? Filthy casuls.
It’s super easy arithmetic too, just remember ”Pi seconds is a nanocentury.”
Your prayer has been answered! Hear ye:
https://www.w3schools.com/tags/tag_time.asp
Nah, for everything.
.
I really wonder how americans were able to fuck this one up. There are three ways to arrange these and two of them are acceptable!
Edit: Yes, I meant common ways, not combinatorically possible ways.
Hmmm more like 6 ways but I get your point
Three ways that people actually use. YYYY-MM-DD, DD-MM-YYYY, and MM-DD-YYYY (ew).
AFAIK no-one does YYYY-DD-MM, DD-YYYY-MM, or MM-YYYY-DD... yet. Don't let the Americans know about these formats, they might just start using them out of spite.
What the actual fuck
'hey man, what date is it today?' 'well it's the 15th of 2023, August'
Lmao, I want to try responding like this and see what the reactions are
I want to try this, too. Make it more possessive, though. The 15th of 2023's August. Really add to the confusion.
I'll avoid those at all cost and go with the new standard of YY-MM-DD-YY. What's the date today? 20-08-10-23
whoa, take it easy there Satan.
Need more julian dates, YYYY-JJJ.
What, 2023-223 for the 223rd day of the year 2023? That... is oddly appealing for telling the actual progress of the year or grouping. No silly "does this group have 31, 30, 29 or 28 members", particularly the "is this year a multiple of four, but not of 100, unless it's also a multiple of 400?" bit with leap days.
You'll have oddities still, no matter which way you slice it, because our orbit is mathematically imperfect, but it's a start.
So we need to correct our orbit is what I'm hearing!
That'd be a wack premise for a crazy scientist story
Twelve ways if you count two-digit years. My nephew was born on 12/12/12 which was convenient.
My grandmother was born in 1896 and lived to be 102, just long enough for the pre-Y2K computer systems in hospitals to think she was a two-year-old.
Ouch!
I lost about an hour of my life trying to create a historical timeline in MS Excel. Eventually learned this is impossible with dates earlier than 1900.
this guy does combinatorics
It's how the dates are typically said, here. November 6th, 2020 = 11/6/2020. [Edit: I had written 9 instead of 11 for November.] (We basically never say the sixth of November. It sounds positively ancient.) It's easy to use, but I agree that YYYY-MM-DD is vastly superior for organization.
Where is here that November = 9? Probably somewhere you've had a long day
Oct = 8
Nov = 9
Dec = 10
In metric time there are only 10 months per year
When is your independence day, again?
Anyway, in Australia (and, I suspect, other places that use DD/MM/YYYY) we use "{ordinal} of {month}" (11th of August), "{ordinal} {month}" (11th August), and "{month} {ordinal}" (August 11th) pretty much interchangeably. In writing but not in speaking, we also sometimes use "{number} {month}" (11 August). That doesn't have any bearing on how we write it short form though, because those are different things. It's not the defence many Americans seem to think it is of their insane method of writing the short form.
July 4th, why?
So, not "the fourth of July" as everyone else calls it? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Independence_Day_%28United_States%29
"Fourth of July" is the name of the holiday. It happens on "July 4th".
"Independence Day" was a movie in the 90's. We never say "Independence Day" around here unless the topic is Will Smith or REM.
I see this weird argumentation every time the dating system comes up 🙄
It's kinda tongue in cheek, but that's how we say things in my part of the US. "Fourth of July" is spoken of exactly as if it were the name of the day, like "Thanksgiving" or "Christmas". Just like we still refer to "Cinco de Mayo" even though we don't speak Spanish.
Obviously it's not really called "Fourth of July", but nobody ever says "Nth of Month" here otherwise. And I'm kinda grateful as I like "bigger to smaller" notation. Yeah, mm/dd/yyyy sucks, but saying it that way is pretty expressive because the year rarely matters. So it's like "Hours and minutes" or (yeah, sorry Europeans) Feet and inches. Bigger before smaller quickly expresses precise information to our caveman brains. At least to my caveman brain.
Also, the movie really wasn't that good in retrospect, but we had some sort of fever about it because it was expensive with lots of explosions, and good music licensing. And both patriots and antipatriots had something to get out of it because aliens blew up the White House.
I've never once been confused about a written date whilst in the US. Your country's other-side-of-the-Earth flip-floppery on how it uses dates really doesn't (and shouldn't) impact our system, which we continue to use because it has proven effective and easy. Trying to stagnate an evolving culture/language is pointless and about as futile as trying to force a river to run backwards. If people start jumbling up how we do it here, like you say Australia does, then that will be right, too.
Saying it like that is no problem and not ambiguous. Writing it like that makes no sense though.
It is a bit of a chicken and egg question though. Because do Americans not say it that way because of the date format or is that the date format because you don't say it that way?
Because in countries using DD.MM.YY we absolutely do say 6th of November.
That's probably what happened. Though I do like starting with the larger context when talking about dates, but omitting it when talking about the current month or year.
I'm canadian and I've always prefered this format for the same reason. 11/6/23 is november 6th 2023, not the 11th of June 2023, that's weird.
As a different Canadian, I always use YYYY-MM-DD and a 24 hour clock.
Except that mm/dd/yyyy and dd/mm/yyyy can be ambiguous, I definitely prefer the former if I'm not using an ISO date. But normally I just write ISO and my head translates to MMM dd,yyyy
I use it everywhere too. Screw the naysayers
Not only visually satisfying, but also logically sound
Hell I use it in my diary. It just works
I wish we this for work.
Not on paper documents though. Here in Europe I have to write dd-mm-yyyy.
There are two ways of writting dates: the "yyyy-mm-dd" one and the wrong one
ISO 8601 ftw. Here's the date, time, and duration for our next meeting:
2023-08-10T20:00:00PT2H30M
But where is a timezone?
Timezone is optional, and when missing is read as local time.
In my mind, default is UTC unless otherwise specified.
luckily Local time can be any timezone!
PT, Pacific time. /s
nearly forgot that 8601 has support for durations as well
It handles ambiguity too. Want to say something lasts for a period of 1 month without needing to bother checking how many days are in the current and next month?
P1M. Done. Want to be more explicit and say 30 days?P30D. Want to say it in hours? Add theTseparator:PT720H.I used this kind of notation all the time when exporting logged historical data from SCADA systems into a file whose name I wanted to quickly communicate the start of a log and how long it ran:
20230701T0000-07--P30D..v101_pressure.csv(“
--” is the ISO-8601 (2004) recommended substitute for “/” in file names)If anyone is interested, I made this Bash script to give me
uptimebut expressed as an ISO 8601 time period.better than the absolutely deranged MM/DD/YYYY and imo the best when it comes to international communication
I've been told " You don't say 6th June, do you?" too many times
In the U.K. we do all the same. Sixth of June.
The amusing thing is that in Swedish you definitely do. Or actually "6:e juni".
Even Americans does as well: "4th of July".
Germany too
ISO 8601 is amazing for data storage and standardizing the date.
Display purposes sure, whatever you feel like
But goddammit if you don’t use ISO 8601 to store dates, I will find you, and I will standardize your code.
epoch not acceptable then?
Epoch is also acceptable if humans don't need to understand it
I will agree it’s a valid storage but it has to be specified in ms
I actually need to standardize my code. I've got "learning F2" as something I want to do soon. The goal: use the exif data of my pictures to create
[date in ISO 8601] - [original filename].[original file type termination]So a picture taken the third of march 2022 titled "asdf.jpg" would become "2022-3-3 - asdf.jpg"
Help? lol
If you're on Linux exiftool can get the creation date for you:
exiftool -p '$CreateDate' -d '%Y-%m-%d' FILENAME, and you could run tgat in a loop over your files, something like:Obviously don't justbgo running code some stranger just posted on the internet, especially as I haven't tested it, but that should copy images from the current directory to a subdirectory called 'out' with the correct filenames.
ok I think I finally need to ask
What the fuck is up with the html code? Ive seen this in a lot of posts and it just throws me every time.
I don't see any HTML when I look at that comment from Lemmy, but kbin seems to make a real mess of rendering code blocks. Basically that bit had a few lines of code they could yse to do what they wanted.
Do you mean strings like
%Y? They're not url-encoded values - they're strftime format directives.I did this in the past and I would search through my notes... If I had notes ffs.
Can you give more context, what are you using? Language / system / etc?
I'm using NixOS. Ext4 filesystem. As to language, I'm not entirely sure what you mean. If you refer to the character set in the filenames, I think there are no characters that deviate from the English alphabet, numbers, dashes, and underscores.
Oh ok so you’re more so working with folder structure etc, so bash for when you plug-in a card?
I’m thinking in more programmatic terms, there’s definitely some bash scripting you can execute. Or just go balls out and write a service that executes on systemctl
Excuse me?! ISO 8601 >> *
I enforce ISO 8601 for the shared storage in my office. Before I got there, files were kinda stored in all kinds of formats, but mostly month first.
I tell the person under me she can store her files in her user any way she wants, but if it goes into shared storage, it's ISO 8601. I even have a folder in there called
!Date format: YYYY-MM-DD Descriptionto help anyone else remember.Haha I did the same.
It was the Wild West, no standard, everyone used their own date format all in the same shared storage.
I've got most of the office doing it correctly now
Oh that's a good idea. Thx.
YYYY-MM-DD for everything. My PC clock, my phone and even my handwritten notes all use that format.
The only other acceptable format is military notation: DD MMM YYYY.
That's quirky - how is there anything logical about the military time format?
The 3 "M"s are not numerical, but indicate characters. For example 01 Jan 2023.
Considering how there's almost no computers anymore with such limited resources that they can't store a string or convert to one, it's kind of crazy anybody bothers with the ambiguity of using numbers for the month.
The limited resource is not Compute Power, but Engineer time. Sure, you could ask someone to implement wrappers everywhere in the system so that the display is human-readable - or you could put one label somewhere clarifying the date format to readers.
Implement wrappers everywhere? Why can't they just write a single function that takes an ISO date a spits out a string (human readable) date? I'd put money down that such a function already exists in almost every library that deals with dates.
That's why I said "implement" and not just "write". The process of wiring in that existing function has non-negligible cost, as does keeping it updated/patched.
Sure, it should be pretty small - but it's non-zero. Is it worth it? That's a product decision.
Hmm good point actually
Yes spreadsheet apps like excel do this. If I remember correctly MMMM would write the full month. January.
i just write mmmmmmm because you can never have too many m's.
It's written like 07 Aug 2013. It's consistent in character length, doesn't confuse internationals, doesn't take much space and is written exactly like being said around here. It's just not that great for file names.
Yeah, ok. Expanding the month to 3 chars does reduce potential confusion
I feel the need to be pedantic and point out that this is only necessary, however because of the ridiculous degenerate convention of MM DD YY(YY?) used by said country...
/c/ISO8601
Come on man, let that hashtag shit die with Reddit!
Why do you support centralization of Lemmy
Do I?
I imagine your complaint was referring to a community name in the abstract "/c/iso8601" rather than the proper Lemmy centralized name !lemmy.ml!@/c/iso8601 or whatever the horrible format that it is
My complaint was about the "subreddits as hashtags" thing that people did on Reddit where they'd link a non-existent sub (or one that only contained screenshots of people linking to it) instead of thinking of something original.
Separately, what's wrong with the ![email protected] format? It's pretty simple to remember and is very much part of the federated way that Lemmy is designed to be used!
Linking communitirs !iso8601!@someinstance is one of the core reasons why Lemmy failed to capture even 1% of 1% of 1% of Reddit's userbase at probably the greatest time of turmoil of discontent with that site for the next 5 years.
This formulation insist on centralizing communities in single instances and creates both fragmentation of the community while also making them concentrated on whatever the biggest one is.
The few users that make it past the registration catastrophe, when they realize this is how communities work, they just leave, because it means Lemmy isn't federated where it counts. Communities end up owned by a single instance owner and mod team. It's Reddit except somehow worse.
I have a watch that uses MM/DD for date, which pissed me off to no end. While looking for a way to change it to DD/MM, I found out that they actually used ISO-8601 and dropped the year. Now I don't know how to feel about it.
If they dropped the year it's no longer an ISO date.
ISO 8601 has spec for how to drop the year. You write it like
--MM-DD(two dashes to indicate omission). Of course nobody really uses it beside the absolute nerds (e.g. me).https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/iso_8601_2x.png
Link: https://xkcd.com/1179/
ISO dates are the goat because they string compare correctly. Just yesterday I shaved 2 full seconds off a page transition by removing a date parse in the middle of a hot sorting loop. Everything should use ISO in my opinion.
Maybe we should form some sort of organization, on an international stage, dedicated to creating and maintaining such standards.
Now thats the kind of indoctrination of children I can get behind
It's ISO8601
To the commenters justifying the written form MM-DD-YYYY on the basis of preferring to say the name of the month followed by the day (which the written numerical sequence does not preclude you from doing). If someone were to say something like "the time is a quarter to eleven" do you think they would have a case for writing it 45:10? And if so, how would you deal with the ambiguity of "ten past ten" if they wrote it 10:10 instead of 10:10?
This guy's throwing wrenches into engines
YYMMDD is how a start my file names. It'll work great for another 75 years or so.
Then you just move everything into a new "20" folder.
So your saying to name files
YY/yy/MM/DD/file_name.jpg
/20/23/08/10/New File(2) - Copy - Copy - Copy.pdf
Looks like you've worked on some source code a time or two.
YYMMDD filename.ext
Windows auto sorts it so any folder or any code reading it reads it in order without needing anything special. It shortens the filename, it's fast to type on the number pad
Well if you're naming today's file 230810_file.jpg then you could just move this century's files to /20/230810_file.jpg once we roll over.
Found the guy who was born after the year 2000
Way off
I like yyyy-mm-dd and dd/mm/yyyy
Leave them hyphens out though, 20230809
Who hurt you that bad, my friend?
Tbh 20230810_0600 doesn't seem that bad...
Add periods 2023.08.09
Periods belong before file extensions and nowhere else.
Right?! We're not animals!
what the fuck did you just fucking say about me you little bitch ill have you know i graduated top of my class in the navy seals and ive been involved in numerous secret raids on alquaeda and i have over 300 confirmed kills i am trained in gorilla warfare and im the top sniper in the entire us armed forces you are nothing to me but just another target i will wipe you the fuck out with precision the likes of which has never been seen before on this earth mark my fucking words you think you can get away with saying that shit to me over the internet think again fucker as we speak i am contacting my secret network of spies across the usa and your ip is being traced right now so you better prepare for the storm maggot the storm that wipes out the pathetic little thing you call your life youre fucking dead kid i can be anywhere anytime and i can kill you in over seven hundred ways and thats just with my bare hands not only am i extensively trained in unarmed combat but i have access to the entire arsenal of the united states marine corps and i will use it to its full extent to wipe your miserable ass off the face of the continent you little shit if only you could have known what unholy retribution your little clever comment was about to bring down upon you maybe you would have held your fucking tongue but you couldnt you didnt and now youre paying the price you goddamn idiot i will shit fury all over you and you will drown in it youre fucking dead kiddo
Thank you for understanding the assignment.
Right, like "filename.shar.z.uu"
exe
🤮
I'm a systems guy. ISO8601 or die. Whomever decided to put the most significant digits at the end of MMDDYYYY can get fired. From a cannon. Into the sun.
Makes a lot more sense as it gets easy to sort files that way.
When I try to enter a date in excel and it formats it as numerical 424523 or some shit smh
Use YYYY-DD-MM for pure chaos.
Tab completion approves of this naming scheme.
I find that it's better than confusing month and day and going insane when dealing with both American and Bri'ish clients
Year-Month-Day best everywhere
Unix epoch for life! 😂
Gotta love well sorted items.
Lot of talk of numerics only. The problem there is knowing what format the information is in since clearly there are 3 possibilities. Without context and during certain parts of the month you're hosed. Best to remove ambiguity and go with the alpha numeric format.
DD MMM YY (or alternatively YYYY)
11 Aug 2023
Ambiguity gone.
23 Aug 23. Ya, no ambiguity. /s
2023-08-23 is the way.
Any date format can be unambiguous as long as it's the one that everyone agrees on, and all date formats will be ambiguous as long as we have several in use.
I kinda gave up, nowadays when i write a date to someone i specify the date format. Like i will send "01/05/2024 (DD/MM/YYYY)" because it's the only way to be sure
The second reason why yyyy-MM-dd is the correct way to write days (beside being sortable by default) is because even Americans doesn't have any similar format that it can be confused with.
I learned this in my first half year as a programmer I think, somewhere well over a decade back and so far it seems that guy was right.
As monsterous as it is yyyy-mm-dd could also be misconstrued by said unfortunate Americans as yyyy-dd-mm because...well...yeah. As noted elsewhere this dd mmm yyyy format also works nicely in written and verbal communication as 12th of august where no one ever is going to write or speak to each other twenty twenty three august twelfth. So again, more universal and less ambiguous.
There's no amibuity with year first and done properly like YYYY-MM-DD.
Your reasoning is that the ambiguity exists due to using numbers. The ambiguity is only for 2/3 numerical methods
As monstrous as it is yyyy-mm-dd could also be misconstrued by said unfortunate Americans as yyyy-dd-mm because...well...yeah. As noted elsewhere this dd mmm yyyy format also works nicely in written and verbal communication as 12th of august where no one ever is going to write or speak to each other twenty twenty three august twelfth. So again, more universal and less ambiguous.
Problem is that languages get in the way. Some are pretty similar like
15 ago(Spanish) being15 Aug(English), but1 ene(Spanish) aren't that similar to1 Jan(English).And for the usual "But English is used everwhere! I live in X!" crowd: NO, it isn't. Not everything you see as an "expat" is the same as the actual locals with their own language.
Seeing as I do a lot of AV editing I use this format to keep track of Audio files I do production on. YYYYMMDD Filename Version. It's often a case of working on a file and coming back to it weeks or months later, and in most cases there are multiple versions and revisions as I collaborate with my production partner.
It helps me keep track of the timeframe, what it is and which version so I can ensure rendered versions I'm using in other directories or as assets in other files are consistent and up to date.
The directories got quite messy and confusing initially until I adopted the ISO date format for this case.
Y'all MFs need version control.
No love for DD-YYYY-MM?
Think about what that would do in a filesystem...
It's great for handwritten notes or single bits of information, but for a dataset spanning a period of time it makes no sense
Wait are you serious?
Why would you ever not put the month next to the day
Directories exist for a reason
load "$",8
?FILE NOT FOUND ERROR
This was actually the very first lemmy notification I got!
https://futurism.com/the-byte/gen-z-kids-file-systems
You have 80s/90s thinking.
This is me but without the dashes. Haha I know l, what’s wrong with me..
But I’ve also started using 10/Aug in emails to make things crystal clear.
Anyway.
join south africa and (sorta) japan, use YYYY-MM-DD as a default - sorts well, zero ambiguity.. at least until some joker starts popularising YYYY-DD-MM, anyway
Everyone talks big game about the file names but forget how important standardizing on log time stamps is too. When I’m able to pipe a bunch of logs into sort, I get so happy.
Yeah, exactly, it's always a pita to pipe stuff through sed/awk to reformat the timestamps
This is big pp idea and I like it.
The only way to organize my Grateful Dead shows
I'm a firm believer of 01 Jan 2023 for everything else
Facts. The sorting system for files inevitably makes YYYY-MM-DD more optimal. I tried to resist but it doesn't work.
where is the Americans text
I always have written my dates this way. It's one of those things that always seemed weird to me and then when I realize that only in America do we write our dates MM-DD-YYYY /facepalm
I don't just to piss you off, yes you ..
For speaking or writing it out going month then day feels natural, although I know it’s a regional thing. If you’re going number format, it should always go smallest to largest (DD-MM-YYYY) or largest to smallest (YYYY-MM-DD). For file names, definitely the latter so you can sort by alphabetical and everything is in order.
Yes, of course. Go to google translate and type in october 2nd 2023. Change the target language.
Yes, yes. Feet, miles, liquid miles, solid football fields and other nonsense also feels natural.
What? I haven't been sorting by file names since mid 00s. Every file system I've used has the ability to sort by whatever I like
What if you create a file that has information related to a date that the file wasn't created on?
For example, you write a report about an event that happened two weeks ago. Now the created and modified metadata is tied to today's date, not the date two weeks ago.
I usually give file names a human readable name like "report on the event 27.7.1994". Makes it easier for other people to understand if I need to pass the file on.
For images I keep the original file name when I store it in a database (Capture one/Lightroom/etc) in folders by the year and then month they are taken: 2023 --> 08 and so on. If I eksport images for a specific project, I will keep the original file name but add project name and give it a number based on sequence. Everything else is in the metadata
MM-DD-YYYY is the only way. I can't stand the way you Europeans do it.
But if they day is less than 12 you have no way of verifying it's not supposed to actually be DD-MM-YYYY, plus sorting by date is all fucked if you don't put year first...
I'm american and disgusted
Nah MMDDYY for me fam
You are objectively wrong.
Yes, MM DD YY only makes sense when you're speaking.
In written language it should always follow the order of smallest to largest, meaning day, month, and then year. Imo.
Though I personally try to use YYYY-MM-DD as much as possible in day to day life, if not applicable I use DD MM YYYY. YYYY-MM-DD of course doesn't follow the order of smallest to largest, instead following the opposite order, though at least it has an order.
When does saying the month first ever help when you're speaking? The month doesn't change for like 30 days. The only thing that matters is dd which changes daily. If someone asks me what the date I'll give them the day date and nothing else.
I don't need to say it's the 9th and watch them panic that maybe it's January.
I don't even know how to reply to this.
So if you made an appointment for the 2nd of September you'd tell 'em "yeah let's meet on the 2nd" or "yeah let's meet on the 245th" you're gonna need the month somewhere.
Of course if it's the same month it wouldn't make a difference if you said "let's meet on the 10th" or "let's meet on the 10th of August" but if you're making appointments for different months which in everyday life or in a work environment is not unusual you can't just say "yeah the 2nd" and expect them to know which month. "Yeah you can expect delivery by the 4th".
Tl;Dr:
I didn't even say "it's the only way to say it when speaking" I said "only makes sense when you're speaking." because in written form MM DD YY is just shit for everyone except Americans, to the point where context sometimes is the only saving grace. Vice versa applies.
Yep you're 100% right. My job start date was miscommunicated because of this, they were like "you start on the 17th"... turns out it was the next month. Better than getting it wrong in the other direction though for sure!
You only need to add the month if it's not the current month. The same with the year.
Largest to smallest is way more logical than smallest to largest. You start general and get more specific as you progress. It is in general a better approach to conveying information and cataloging data. Not just dates.
Yeah but if you're communicating a date, then it's likely that the larger chunks of time will match and can be ommitted, so it's natural to go up the chain in until you hit the day/month/year that matches the current one. Although I guess that'd imply using minutes before hours... I guess you could go large to small and skip anything that matches too. Nvm lol
For many people it doesn't. It's something that's exclusive to the US. In British English it's day before month when speaking.
It's something that is taught in school as "remember that the Americans say date before month so you don't get confused". But in a business context it's bloody annoying you don't switch to the international standard.
Yes, we also do days first in Germany.
Like I replied to someone else in this thread: I wasn't saying "it's the only way that makes sense when speaking" I said "it only makes sense when speaking". That doesn't make any other way of saying dates make less sense when speaking though.
It turns out I can label my files any way I like, thanks.
No, you can't. Don't bother locking the doors tonight, I'm coming in anyway.
The judge a few weeks later: "you did this because of WHAT?"
Reported
I'm the same in my heart, but my brain says YYYYMMDD